Going Native

THE phrase ''heart of darkness'' occurs only once, as far as I can tell, in Barbara Kingsolver's haunting new novel, ''The Poisonwood Bible.'' When it does, it falls from the mouth of Orleanna Price, a Baptist missionary's wife who uses it to describe not the Belgian Congo, where she, her husband and their four daughters were posted in 1959, but the state of her marriage in those days and the condition of what she calls ''the country once known as Orleanna Wharton,'' wholly occupied back then by Nathan Price, aforesaid husband and man of God. Joseph Conrad's great novella flickers behind her use of that phrase, and yet it doesn't. Orleanna is not a quoting woman, and for the quoting man in the family, her strident husband, there can be only one source -- the Bible, unambiguous and entire, even in a land that demonstrates daily the suppleness of language. ''Tata Jesus is bangala!'' he shouts during his African sermons. It never occurs to him that in Kikongo, a language in which meaning hangs on intonation, bangala may mean '''precious and dear,'' but it also means the poisonwood tree -- a virulent local plant -- when spoken in the flat accent of an American zealot.

The Prices are Nathan and Orleanna and their daughters: Ruth May, the youngest; Rachel, the oldest, a pale blond Mrs. Malaprop of a teen-ager; and the twins, Leah and Adah. Both twins are gifted, but Adah suffers from hemiplegia, which leaves her limping and nearly speechless. The female members of the family narrate ''The Poisonwood Bible'' in turn. Orleanna does so in retrospect, from her later years on Sanderling Island, off the coast of Georgia. The girls, however, tell their story from the Congo as it happens, on the precipice of events, like an epistolary novel written from a place with no postal service and no hope of pen pals.

Nathan Price narrates nothing. And yet his certitude -- and the literal-minded ferocity with which he expresses it -- is the altar around which these women arrange themselves. We already know his story, Kingsolver implies. Most of what we have always heard, she suggests, are stories told by men like him. ''The Poisonwood Bible'' thus belongs to the women, and it is a story about the loss of one faith and the discovery of another, for each woman according to her kind. As Adah, so bright, so willing to torque the mother tongue, puts it, ''One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires.''

The Prices travel from Bethlehem, Ga., to a village called Kilanga on the Kwilu River in the summer of 1959, just a few months before Patrice Lumumba becomes Prime Minister of the newly independent Republic of the Congo -- not long, therefore, before he is arrested and murdered with the complicity of the United States and its President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose photograph Orleanna hangs in the kitchen hut behind their mud house: ''I'd cut it out of a magazine and nailed it over the plank counter where I kneaded the bread. . . . I remember every detail of him: the clear-rimmed glasses and spotted tie, the broad smile, the grandfatherly bald head like a warm, bright light bulb. He looked so trustworthy and kind. A beacon from home, reminding me of our purpose.'' The irony in Orleanna's words is the same irony she uses to describe the early days of her marriage, when there was still room for laughter in her husband's evangelical calling, before her pregnancies embarrassed him, before he returned from World War II a different man -- a man who planned ''to save more souls than had perished on the road from Bataan.'' Nathan Price escaped that road by sheer luck, and knowing it curled his heart ''like a piece of hard shoe leather.''

In Conrad's novella, the heart of darkness is both Kurtz's despoiled purpose and the terrain in which that purpose is worked. In Kingsolver's novel, the heart of darkness belongs only to men like Nathan Price and a local pilot named Eeben Axelroot, a figure from Graham Greene who shuttles spooklike in and out of Kilanga. The Congo is a hard place for the Price women, and its people are unfathomable at first, but Kilanga contains no Conradian darkness. Army ants, drought, hookworm, hunger, pestilential rain, diseases and still more diseases and green mamba snakes, yes, but no darkness. What all the Price women discover -- all except Rachel, ''whose only hopes for the year were a sweet-16 party and a pink mohair twin set'' -- is the near-perfect adaptation of the Congolese to the harsh conditions of their existence, a fittedness that is beautiful in itself. With that knowledge comes the discovery of the Prices' own profound ignorance. Once the comedy of colliding cultures ends, the tragedy begins. As Leah says: ''Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place. Especially here.''

The Congo permeates ''The Poisonwood Bible,'' and yet this is a novel that is just as much about America, a portrait, in absentia, of the nation that sent the Prices to save the souls of a people for whom it felt only contempt, people who already, in the words of a more experienced missionary, ''have a world of God's grace in their lives, along with a dose of hardship that can kill a person entirely.'' The Congolese are not savages who need saving, the Price women find, and there is nothing passive in their tolerance of missionaries. They take the Americans' message literally -- elections are good, Jesus too -- and expose its contradictions by holding an election in church to decide whether or not Jesus shall be the personal god of Kilanga. Jesus loses.

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And yet, for all its portraiture of place, its reflexive political vitriol, its passionate condemnation of Nathan Price, ''The Poisonwood Bible'' is ultimately a novel of character, a narrative shaped by keen-eyed women contemplating themselves and one another and a village whose familiarity it takes a tragedy to discover. Rachel is the epitome of America's material culture, a cunning, brainless girl who parodies television commercials and says of Eeben Axelroot, ''I'm willing to be a philanderist for peace, but a lady can only go so far where perspiration odor is concerned.'' Ruth May, the baby, is the innocent whose words betray the guilty; she is the catalyst that splits the Price family apart. When Orleanna speaks of the Congo, many years later, she does so by addressing Ruth May, whose questioning eyes watch over Orleanna's life with more compassion than ever fell from the burning gaze of her husband's God.

These are precious creatures, but none are as precious to the reader as Leah and Adah, the twin and the niwt, as Adah calls herself, referring to her backward condition. Limping, nearly silent, Adah is a verbal gymnast, a dedicated diarist, a profound skeptic. Her father, she reports, probably interpreted her twisted newborn state ''as God's Christmas bonus to one of His worthier employees.'' Adah's wit bristles throughout this novel; it is wit of a kind that Leah, a tomboy who eagerly seeks her father's approval, would never use. Leah's, instead, is an entirely ethical understanding.

''The Poisonwood Bible'' turns on several axes, and one of them is Leah's struggle to rebalance herself morally when she finally realizes exactly who her father is. Once she had said, ''My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's foot soldiers, while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.'' But when the armor fell, she saw that Nathan Price's ''blue eyes with their left-sided squint, weakened by the war, had a vacant look. His large reddish ears repelled me. My father was a simple, ugly man.''

All the Prices adapt to the Congo, in their way, but Adah and Leah are carried farthest in their adaptation. Rachel accomplishes this by not adapting at all. ''The way I see Africa,'' she says, ''you don't have to like it but you sure have to admit it's out there. You have your way of thinking and it has its, and never the train ye shall meet!'' For Adah, adaptation comes in the form of unforgiving self-discovery, the realization that ''even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious.''

Leah, the conscience of this striking novel, is forever measuring the distance she must travel before her adaptation is made perfect. It was so when her father owned her, in her mother's words, ''like a plot of land,'' and it is still so in her maturity -- wed, so to speak, to the continent. In the end, she explains: ''I am the un-missionary, as Adah would say, beginning each day on my knees, asking to be converted. Forgive me, Africa, according to the multitudes of thy mercies.''

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A version of this review appears in print on October 18, 1998, on Page 7007007 of the National edition with the headline: Going Native. Today's Paper|Subscribe